The firm is involved in thin
film technology for solar power. It's a growing industry, but
Hanergy's growth has been astonishingly rapid. It has made
company chairman Li Hejun China's richest man,
according to Forbes.

But there are some
issues.

In short, the share price has
surged in recent years, spiking by more than 1,000 percent and
turning any early investments in the firm into massive cash
piles. But pretty much all of the gains have happened just before
trading closes.

Here's the FT's Miles Johnson
and Gavin Jackson explaining just how severe the end-of-day spike
in shares is:

A Financial Times analysis of
two years of trading data of Hanergy Thin Film stock — more than
800,000 individual trades on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange — shows
that shares consistently surged late in the day, about 10 minutes
before the exchange’s close, from the start of 2013 until
February this year...

It means that an investor who held HTF shares from the start of
trading at 9am to 3.30pm would have lost money — despite the
company's share price rising by 1,168 per cent between January
2013 and February 9 2015.

A trader who bought HK$1,000 ($129) worth of HTF at 9am on every
day of trading since January 2 2013 and sold those shares at
3.30pm each day, would have seen their money shrink to HK$635 by
February 2015. But if they held on for just under half an hour
more each time, the HK$1,000 would have turned into HK$8,430.
This calculation does not include overnight gains.

Hanergy's explosion over recent years has been absolutely
astonishing — the stock's value has risen by more than 1,800%
from the beginning of January 2013 to now.

Here's how it looks:

Google Finance, Business
Insider

When Hanergy's results are placed on the same graph as Hong
Kong's Hang Seng index (on which Hanergy is not listed), the
index is barely visible at all.

The FT spoke to several experts who discussed whether the spike
at the end of a trading day was likely to be the work of
manipulation. Here's one example:

Rajesh Aggarwal, professor of finance at Northeastern University
in Boston and an expert on stock market manipulation cases, also
reviewed the FT findings and raised the spectre of manipulation:
"This is consistent with the stock price having been
systematically manipulated over the past couple of years. This
pattern of large price increases during the last 10 minutes of
trade is extremely unlikely to have occurred randomly."